Foucault News

Frank Fischer, Critical Policy Inquiry. Interpreting Knowledge and Arguments (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

26 August 2025

Frank Fischer, Critical Policy Inquiry. Interpreting Knowledge and Arguments. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024

Presenting a critical approach to the study of public policy and policy analysis, this book offers a postpositivist foundation that challenges empiricist and technocratic approaches to policy studies. Critical Policy Inquiry draws on Jürgen Habermas’s work on communicative action and deliberation, Michel Foucault’s writings on discourse, and the epistemics of social constructivism.

Frank Fischer advances deliberative policy argumentation and the logic of practical reason, exploring how this can be used as a framework for interpreting the interaction of normative and empirical arguments in policy politics. He applies this approach to a diverse range of topics, including technocracy, policy expertise, deliberative democratic politics, interpretive policy analysis, post-truth, climate and Covid denialism, participatory governance, local and tacit knowledge, and the role of emotion in policy controversies. The book concludes with a look to transformative policy learning and the future of the field.

Connecting social and political theory with empirical research, this book is essential for students and scholars of public policy, politics, governance, public administration, and regulatory policy. Its practical, real-world applications will also be of value to policymakers worldwide.

Foucault teeshirts and mugs (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 August 2025

If you’re in the market for a Foucault teeshirt cap or a mug, or indeed either of these items featuring other theorists, have a look at this page on the Zazzle site.

Zazzle is an American site which has a number of mirror sites around the world. I have linked to the Australian one. I first came across these in 2011. They are still going strong with new additions in 2025.

Foucault buttons/badges (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 August 2025

I first posted about these in 2011. They are still going strong.
Presents perhaps for the theorist who has everything?
For purchase from this site. Sales are still going strong in 2025. There are a range of other buttons covering other theorists and iconic figures as well.

Valentina Antoniol and Stefano Marino (Eds) Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence and Shusterman’s Somaesthetics. Ethics, Politics, and the Art of Living (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

23 August 2025

Valentina Antoniol and Stefano Marino (Eds)
Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence and Shusterman’s Somaesthetics. Ethics, Politics, and the Art of Living, Bloomsbury, 2024

Description
Bringing together Michel Foucault’s aesthetics of existence and Richard Shusterman’s somaesthetics, this volume provides a critical comparison of two of the most influential philosophical theories of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Introduced by a comprehensive overview of both concepts by editors Stefano Marino and Valentina Antoniol, the ensuing chapters interrogate the affinities and variances between Foucault’s and Shusterman’s philosophies. Building on the interdisciplinary character of somaesthetics and aesthetics of existence, international scholars explore these ideas through a wide range of topics ranging from care of the self and of the social self to the ethical and political challenges posed by themes as white ignorance, construction of resistances, and production of subjectivities. Given the central role played by the body in both concepts, this volume also affords particular attention to the philosophy of sexuality.

Demonstrating the value of reading these two thinkers together through the adoption of radical interpretive perspectives, Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence and Shusterman’s Somaesthetics highlights the potentialities and the relevance of Foucault’s and Shusterman’s theories, even with respect to our actualité.

Xinling Li, The Manufacturing of ‘Correct Collective Memory’ in Chinese Media and the Resistance of Chinese Netizens (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 August 2025

Xinling Li, The Manufacturing of ‘Correct Collective Memory’ in Chinese Media and the Resistance of Chinese Netizens, In Rawnsley, M.-Y.T., Ma, Y., & Rawnsley, G.D. (Eds.). (2025). Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003362500

Abstract
This chapter examines the concept of ‘correct collective memory’, articulated by China’s foreign affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying during a press conference confirming the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. It explores the construction of correct collective memory in Chinese media and the increasing challenges from rising civilian dissent enabled by new media. The Chinese government’s efforts to control negative perceptions of the zero-Covid policy through mass media propaganda ultimately failed, leading to a significant concession: the country’s reopening in response to the Blank White Paper movement. While mainstream analyses have attributed the movement’s temporary ‘success’ to the extreme inhumanity of China’s Covid restrictions, this chapter argues that new media platforms, particularly social media, have emerged as spaces for contesting memory, for example in the emergence of lockdown diaries. These platforms allow for a clash between citizen and official narratives of social events, preventing the government from easily imposing a unified correct collective memory through traditional methods like survivorship bias and collectivist storytelling.

Federico Jose T. Lagdameo, “Digital Governmentality: Technological Subjectivation and AI” (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 August 2025

Federico Jose T. Lagdameo, “Digital Governmentality: Technological Subjectivation and AI”, Kaabigan: Journal of the Panpacific University, Vol. 3:2, 1-17 (July 2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16786093

Abstract:
This article develops a Foucauldian analysis of artificial intelligence technologies, particularly large language models such as ChatGPT, as contemporary technologies of power. Building upon Michel Foucault’s genealogical critique of disciplinary and biopolitical regimes, it argues that AI systems instantiate new modes of subjectivation through algorithmic rationalities, predictive analytics, and interface designs that structure the conduct of users and the intelligibility of populations. These systems do not merely facilitate communication or automate tasks; they quietly shape behavior, organize possibilities for action, and determine what counts as truth or relevance in everyday life. AI thus functions as a digital apparatus of governmentality—disciplining individuals and regulating populations under the guise of neutrality and efficiency. By drawing out the continuities between modern technologies of power and today’s intelligent systems, this paper seeks to denaturalize the present configuration of the digital subject and open the possibility for a renewed exercise of critique and freedom.

Keywords: Foucault, artificial intelligence, subjectivation, ChatGPT, LLMs, digital governmentality

Weili Zhao, Epistemological flashpoints in China’s ‘person-making’ education with reinvoked cultural discourses: lideshuren as an example (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 August 2025

Weili Zhao, Epistemological flashpoints in China’s ‘person-making’ education with reinvoked cultural discourses: lideshuren as an example, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 59, Issue 3-4, June-August 2025, Pages 568–585
https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhae081

Abstract
As an imprint and reinvigoration of Confucian culture, China foregrounds its 21st-century state-run education as to make national(istic) citizens, reinvoking lideshuren (establishing personhood by cultivating moral excellence) as its signature discourse beyond Western frameworks. Drawing upon Foucault’s thinking, this article untangles China’s effort as being epistemologically vexed in three steps. First, I pick up Foucault’s interpellation on language, discourse, and episteme, evoking a possible language-episteme conflation and/or rupture which is crucial to understanding China’s lideshuren knowledge (re)production and translation within and across cultures. Second, I trace lideshuren to a Confucian prototype to make visible its possible historical–cultural murmurings along a correlative relationality episteme. This historical detour enables me to better problematize, in the third section, contemporary China’s remobilizing, transforming, and reinterpreting Confucian lideshuren discourses to both the Chinese and Western wor(l)d along a delimiting modern ‘trap of philology’. This historical–present epistemological comparison, albeit reductive, feeds into my analysis of China’s making of universal–national(istic) citizens at the nexus of nationalism and globalism. By focusing on China, this article provides implications for comparing national educations as making universal individuals in a globalized age.

Peter Shay, Grasshoppers and Goldfish: Literature, Subjectivation, and Ethical Democracy (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 August 2025

Peter Shay, Grasshoppers and Goldfish: Literature, Subjectivation, and Ethical Democracy, Review of Education Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2025)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.71002/res.v5n3p10

Abstract
As western society descends into a state of pervasive attention-deficit, a profound ethical crisis unfolds. The erosion of sustained concentration – exacerbated by the manipulative attention economies of digital technologies and the infiltration of neoliberal logics into educational spaces – has fostered an increasingly fragmented and polarized social fabric. In this milieu, the self becomes mediated through the fleeting validation of social media metrics, giving rise to desires oriented toward fame and superficial influence, and engendering widespread anxiety and alienation. Students, increasingly isolated and driven by an uncritical need for recognition, seek refuge within the transient affirmations of digital platforms. Yet, through a Foucauldian conception of ‘care of the self,’ cultivated via a dialogic, reflective engagement with the aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions of Literature and the arts, individuals may recover the practices of deep self-reflection necessary for the emergence of a more ethical, inclusive, and resilient society.

Arūnas Mickevičius, Genealogical Critique of Social Practices: Nietzsche and Foucault versus Habermas (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 August 2025

Arūnas Mickevičius, Genealogical Critique of Social Practices: Nietzsche and Foucault versus Habermas, Topos, 1(54) 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.61095/815-0047-2025-1-45-65

Abstract
This article aims to elucidate Michel Foucault’s interpretive engagement with key concepts in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, to demonstrate their significance for the development of Foucault’s genealogical method, and to examine how, particularly in his polemic with Jürgen Habermas, genealogy becomes a question of the legitimacy of critique — namely, how critical interrogation of social practices remains possible. The central thesis is that Foucault’s genealogy, shaped through a selective appropriation of Nietzschean insights and positioned as an alternative to Habermas’s theory of communicative action, should not be understood as a search for universally valid normative structures. Rather, it constitutes a historically grounded framework for understanding subjectivity and social practices, enabling us to think and act differently, and thereby contributing to the ongoing task of freedom.

The article argues that Foucault, instrumentally relying on Nietzsche, developed genealogical hermeneutics as an interpretive practice that is oriented towards a critical understanding of social practices permeated by mechanisms of power. A key divergence from Nietzsche lies in Foucault’s de-psychologization of agency: whereas Nietzsche often grounds knowledge and morality in the subjective tactics of individuals, Foucault treats psychological motivation as an effect of impersonal power strategies without strategists. The article further contends that the core disagreement between Foucault and Habermas concerns the relation between power, truth, and subjectivity. Foucault reverses the traditional dependency: rather than power being conditioned by truth and the subject, it is truth and the subject that are constituted through power. He critiques Habermas’s model of ideal communication as ahistorical and utopian, arguing that no discourse is free from power. Consequently, critique should not aim to abolish power, but to engage it through legal norms, techniques of governance, and an ethos that minimizes domination.

Keywords:
hermeneutics, critical theory, social criticism, interpretation, genealogy, will to power

Navid Pourmokhtari, Toward a Paradigm Shift in International Relations Studies. (Re)Claiming World Peace (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 August 2025

Navid Pourmokhtari, Toward a Paradigm Shift in International Relations Studies. (Re)Claiming World Peace, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024

About this book
This book argues that not only has the present international relations (IR) paradigm failed to preserve global peace in our time, it has also proved to be an obstacle in this regard, and for this reason a paradigm shift is urgently required. With a view to demonstrating the IR paradigm’s failure to secure global peace, moreover, a Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis is used here to flesh out an archaeology of what I call knowledge relations within IR studies.

This analysis reveals that within IR’s paradigmatic corridors of knowledge the theoretical/analytical category of war has been privileged, i.e., elevated to the level of chief subject and object of analysis vis-à-vis peace. In order to show how this is the case, moreover, this book examines the paradigm’s mainstream debates, e.g., those on human nature, power, and the state of nature, and by implication state sovereignty and nationalism, in addition to its authoritative subfields, in particular peace studies, international relations theory, global governance, and security studies. Each of these works reproduces, indeed glorifies, war to the exclusion of a lasting global peace, and in large part by promoting certain knowledges that are racial, colonial, gendered, and consequently bellicose.

All this connotes that the IR paradigm is grounded in a regime of knowledge that tells us everything about the dynamics of war and nothing substantive about realizing peace—hence the pressing need for a paradigm shift. Put differently, under the auspices of IR studies, contemplating peace is fruitless, a mere scholarly mirage, and precisely because achieving it under this paradigmatic status quo is not, and will never be, a condition of possibility. If anything, this book demonstrates that we have not even begun to speak truth to knowledge in the cause of global peace.